What Does Kubernetes Cost for Small Businesses?
What Does Kubernetes Cost for Small Businesses?
Container orchestration with Kubernetes is the industry standard for deploying modern applications. But the pricing models of the major cloud providers are built for enterprise budgets, not for small and medium-sized businesses. If you’re a five-person team running three microservices, AWS or Azure can easily run into four figures per month.
In this article, we break down what Kubernetes actually costs, and where a managed Kubernetes namespace offers a compelling alternative.
Three Common Paths to Kubernetes
1. Self-Hosted on Your Own Servers
You rent bare-metal servers or VMs and install Kubernetes yourself, using kubeadm, k3s, or Rancher. It sounds cheap because you only pay for the servers.
What’s often overlooked:
- Time spent on setup and maintenance: Updates, etcd backups, certificate rotation, monitoring stack, all on you.
- Downtime risk: Without a redundant control plane, cluster failure is a matter of when, not if.
- Hidden labor costs: An experienced DevOps engineer costs €75,000–95,000 gross salary per year. Fully loaded, meaning including employer contributions, it’s closer to €90,000–115,000. Even dedicating a quarter of their time to cluster maintenance adds €1,900–2,400/month.
Realistic total cost: €150–300/month infrastructure + significant time investment.
2. Managed Kubernetes from Hyperscalers (AWS EKS, GKE, AKS)
The major cloud providers handle the control plane for you. In return, you pay a base fee, plus compute, storage, and networking.
AWS EKS example for a typical SMB workload (2 vCPU, 4 GiB RAM, 20 GiB storage), region eu-central-1:
| Item | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|
| EKS Control Plane | $73.00 |
| EC2 t3.medium (2 vCPU, 4 GiB) | $35.04 |
| EBS Storage 20 GiB | ~$2.04 |
| Load Balancer (ALB) | ~$19.71 |
| Egress 50 GiB | $0.00 (100 GB/month free) |
| Total | ~$129.79 |
The $73 control plane price applies to standard support ($0.10/hour). If a cluster slips into extended support, the hourly rate jumps to $0.60, roughly $438/month for the control plane alone.
That’s the minimum configuration. High availability doubles your compute costs. Add ECR for container images, CloudWatch for logs, and (not to forget) the learning curve for IAM roles, VPC configuration, and the dozens of AWS-specific abstractions.
Realistic for SMBs: $150–400/month, plus onboarding time into the AWS ecosystem. That range is on the conservative side: a real setup with private subnets also carries a NAT Gateway (around $38/month) and charges for public IPv4 addresses.
3. Managed Kubernetes Namespace with ITSH
With ITSH, you don’t rent an entire cluster. Instead, you get an isolated namespace on a professionally operated cluster in German data centers.
Before paying anything, you can evaluate the platform on the free tier: one perpetual free namespace per account, no credit card required (200 mCPU, 512 MiB RAM, 1 GiB NFS storage, 10 GiB outbound traffic per month). When you outgrow it, you upgrade in one click and your workloads keep running.
ITSH cost breakdown for the same workload (2 vCPU, 4 GiB RAM, 20 GiB storage, 50 GiB egress):
| Item | Monthly Cost (net) |
|---|---|
| Base fee (PAYG) | €2.52 |
| 2 vCPU (730 h) | €21.90 |
| 4 GiB RAM (730 h) | €14.60 |
| 20 GiB Storage | €1.60 |
| 50 GiB Egress | €0.50 |
| Total (net) | €41.12 |
| All prices net, plus 19% VAT | = €48.93 gross |
There are fixed tiers as an alternative: Namespace S with 1 vCPU, 2 GiB RAM, and 100 GiB of included egress for €15.00 gross per month, more than enough for many small projects. Above it sit Namespace M (2 vCPU, 4 GiB RAM, 250 GiB egress) at €29.00 gross and Namespace L (4 vCPU, 8 GiB RAM, 500 GiB egress) at €49.00 gross. No fixed tier includes storage, PVCs are billed separately.
Cost Comparison at a Glance
| Self-Hosted | AWS EKS | ITSH Namespace | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base fee | €0 | ~€67 ($73.00) | €2.52 (PAYG) |
| Compute (2 vCPU, 4 GiB) | €150–300 (redundant nodes) | ~€50 ($54.75 incl. ALB) | €36.50 |
| Storage 20 GiB | included | ~€2 ($2.04) | €1.60 |
| Egress 50 GiB | included | €0 (free allowance) | €0.50 |
| Monthly total | €150–300 + labor | ~€119 | €41.12 |
| Ops overhead | High | Medium | None |
| GDPR compliance | Your responsibility | Complicated (US provider) | Included (German DC) |
All conversions use 1 USD = 0.92 EUR. All amounts net. The self-hosted column matches the infrastructure figure above: a redundant control plane needs several nodes, a single VPS won’t do.
What’s Included in an ITSH Namespace?
The price isn’t just lower, it includes services that other providers charge extra for:
- ArgoCD/GitOps integration: Deploy via git push, no separate CI/CD pipeline needed for cluster management.
- Daily backups: Namespace resources are backed up daily. Restores currently run through support rather than self-service. This does not replace your own backups.
- Auto-scaling: Pods scale on demand, you only pay for actual usage.
- Visibility into your workloads: The customer portal shows pods, logs, events, and your resource usage, and the platform itself is monitored around the clock. Direct Prometheus access, your own ServiceMonitors or PrometheusRules, and Grafana access are not part of it.
- TLS certificates: Automatic via Let’s Encrypt through the gateway controller.
When Does Each Model Make Sense?
Self-hosted is worth it if you already have a DevOps team and need full control over the cluster, for example due to specific compliance requirements or GPU workloads.
AWS/GKE/AKS makes sense if you’re already deeply invested in a hyperscaler’s ecosystem and budget isn’t a constraint.
A managed namespace with ITSH is the right choice if you:
- Want to run containers in production without managing an entire cluster
- Value European data centers and GDPR compliance
- Have a limited budget (startups, agencies, SMBs)
- Don’t employ a dedicated DevOps team
Worked Example: SaaS Startup with Three Microservices
A typical setup of an API backend, a worker service, and a frontend container:
# Estimated resource requirements
API: 0.5 vCPU, 512 MiB RAM
Worker: 0.5 vCPU, 1 GiB RAM
Frontend: 0.25 vCPU, 256 MiB RAM
Storage: 10 GiB (database PVC)
Egress: 30 GiB/month
Monthly cost on ITSH (PAYG, net):
- Base fee: €2.52
- 1.25 vCPU × 730 h × €0.015: €13.69
- 1.75 GiB RAM × 730 h × €0.005: €6.39
- 10 GiB Storage: €0.80
- 30 GiB Egress: €0.30
- Total: €23.70/month net (€28.20 gross)
The same setup on AWS EKS: at least $110/month, four times the price.
Conclusion
Kubernetes doesn’t have to be expensive. If you don’t need the full feature catalog of a hyperscaler and simply want to run containers reliably with GDPR compliance, a managed namespace is a significantly cheaper alternative.
Starting at €3/month gross base fee, you can get up and running on ITSH immediately, with no cluster setup, no hidden costs, and no vendor lock-in with a US provider.